Unemployed women: think less kitchen sink, more home office

Frances O’Grady, the first woman to lead the TUC, has ignored women’s
entrepreneurial instinct if she thinks unemployed women are heading back to
the kitchen sink in their droves, argues Sophie Cornish.

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A 1950s housewife bored out of her brain by the kitchen sink.Photo: ALAMY

What do you think women do when the going gets tough? If there are no jobs out there for them, do you think they simply give up, pull on the rubber gloves and get back to the kitchen sink? No longer able to conquer the world of business, they get back to doing what they do best – being domestic goddesses?

Well, I think that’s tosh. Perhaps that happened once a time ago but it’s not my experience. So many of the women I know are too bright and determined to feel that because there is a lack of employment (400,000 jobs have been cut from the public sector) and support (benefit cuts, pay freezes and pension shortfalls) that they have no choice but to chuck in the towel and pick up the drying up cloth. Instead there’s a secret army out there – women who are sharing the responsibility for keeping the family afloat. Instead of going back to the kitchen sink, they’re going to the kitchen table – where they start up and run their own enterprises.

She’s right that times are tough. A double-dip recession has meant the biggest squeeze on living standards since the 1920s. Whoever you are, you will be worrying about your financial future. It just frustrates me that not enough people take their own lives into their hands. If you need to earn more money, then get creative about finding a way to do it. Think less kitchen sink, more kitchen table.

I deny that women who are forced out of a job have no option left to them other than to accept the ignominy of unemployment. I believe – as, apparently, do nearly three thousand small businesses that I work closely with on notonthehighstreet.com – that there is another way.

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Instead of going to the kitchen sink, go to the kitchen table. That’s where Holly Tucker and I started our now multi-million pound business, notonthehighstreet.com, a little over seven years ago. As an online marketplace for independent sellers and designer-makers, our site has enabled nearly three thousand women (and a few men) to work from their own homes.

Setting up and running your own business can be hard work, but it gives you flexible hours, strong motivation, huge job satisfaction when it goes well and there is no pay cap – if you work hard, you can earn more. Pull up a chair. Your kitchen table could be a boardroom centrepiece before long.